1. COMLEX-USA Research Update 2004

2. NBOMEs Commitment to Research NBOME has been committed to high quality research to assure the validity and reliability of its test instruments Since 2000, NBOME has published or presented to national or international research conferences more than 30 papers

3. Scope of NBOME Research Efforts New test design and development Test validation Test psychometric quality improvement Test quality control Osteopathic medical education Psychometrics in general

4. The Assessment of the Clinical Skills of Osteopathic Candidates Utilizing Osteopathic Manipulative Therapy in a High Stakes Osteopathic Medical Licensure Examination (Meoli, F., Buser, B. & Gimpel, J.) Results of the most recent NBOME field test demonstrated that osteopathic candidates can be objectively assessed on the ability to recognize the need for, and appropriately apply osteopathic manipulative therapy (OMT) in a high stakes structured clinical setting using standardized patients (SPs)

5. The Assessment of the Clinical Skills of Osteopathic Candidates Utilizing Osteopathic Manipulative Therapy in a High Stakes Osteopathic Medical Licensure Examination (Meoli, F., Buser, B. & Gimpel, J.) A paper presented to the annual meeting of International Association of Medical Regulatory Authorities, Dublin, Ireland, March 2004

6. Meeting the challenges of osteopathic medical education: Satisfying technical standards and accommodation needs (Smoley, J. & Keiser, S.) Proposed specific technical requirements with both high and low-tech approaches for accommodating individuals with disabilities in osteopathic medical training settings A paper to be presented to the Fifth International Conference on Higher Education and Disability, Imsbruch, Austria, July 2004

7. Assessing the ability of medical students to perform osteopathic manipulative techniques (Boulet, J., Gimpel, J., Dowling, D. & Finley, M.) Results of a NBOME performance assessment field test demonstrated that OMT can be assessed in the context of a multi-station standardized patient examination A paper published in JAOA, May 2004

8. Setting standards on a high-stakes, performance-based, assessment of osteopathic clinical skills (Boulet, J., Sprafka, S. & Gimpel, J.) Demonstrated that the examinee-centered standard setting method worked reasonably well for humanistic and data gathering components of performance assessment program A paper to be published in JAOA

9. Changing landscape of osteopathic undergraduate medical education (Shen, L. & Meoli, F.) The significant differences between public and private schools in licensing examination performance observed 10 years ago do not exist today. A paper to be presented to the 11th Ottawa International Medical Education Conference, Barcelona, Spain, July 2004

10. Dimensionality of COMLEX (Schulz, M. & Shen, L.) COMLEX is a progressive and coherent measurement series as this dimensionality study demonstrated that 3 components of the COMLEX measure a common underlined trait A paper to be presented to the 11th Ottawa International Medical Education Conference, Barcelona, Spain, July 2004

11. The assumption of Rasch-Model based item map approach in setting pass/fail standards (Shen, L.) This criterion-based standard setting method can be improved by taking into account the impact of structure items A paper presented to the annual meeting of American Educational Research Association, San Diego, April 2004

12. NBOME will continue its commitment in high quality research NBOME also encourages the osteopathic medical education community to conduct research using COMLEX and other NBOME test results to improve osteopathic medical education and assessment